Avoid contaminating your clay in the pasta machine with other colours of clay.

I am sure some of you know this already but I only just worked it out so I thought I would share it in case some of you don't know either.

I clean my pasta machine with a baby wipe between colours of clay. I wipe  the underside of the rollers (underneath the machine) where the crumbles sometimes collect and I wipe the top whilst turning the handle to make sure the rollers are clean. Sometimes though I still get annoying streaks of colour across my clay and I couldn't work out where they were coming from. I decided it was time to clean my pasta machine. My husband took it apart and cleaned it for me. Great!

Not  long after that a purple streak appeared on my white clay! Horror it had only just been taken apart and thoroughly cleaned! I played around trying to work out where the clay could possibly be coming from. I turned the handle to rotate the rollers backwards and there was my answer!

Pasta machine with stray purple clay on the rollers

I checked it out and if you turn the rollers backwards you get little stray bits of clay pretty much everytime. I am guessing my contamination comes when I inadvertantly rotate the rollers the wrong way a little. I guess it comes from the scrape plates at the bottom (where the crumbles collect on the outside).

Now I have incorporated rolling the rollers backwards as part of my cleaning routine and I haven't had any contamination issues since.

Pasta Machine Thickness Chips

For ages I have mainly used the largest and the smallest settings on the pasta machine (I have an Imperia one with 6 settings). I can't see much difference between the first 3 settings. I decided to spend 5 minutes making some reference chips from some scrap.

Pasta Machine Thickness Chips

There really isn't much difference between the first 2 settings, hardly worth having. So now I can check and see what the settings correspond to. Not sure how much I will use it but I am glad I now know not to bother with setting 2 at all.